Morphex's blogologue (Life, technology, music, politics, business, mental health and more)

My health, obsessive compulsions, privacy rights

OK, so it's been a long time since I blogged the last time. For about a year or so now my mental health has changed in a positive way.. although I guess I've been depressed for a while, my two main issues, psychosis and anxiety have improved dramatically.

So it's a mixed bag you may say, as things improve, there are (natural) reactions to what one has been through. At the same time I've not seen my kids more than a couple of hours each month since last summer, and that's really tough, in the emotional, sad way.

I think I've had fairly deep issues for many years, but been good at covering it up, for different reasons. Anxiety, or what could be said to be similar to obsessive compulsions, has been one of the main things I've worked with in therapy. To put it simply, OCD/anxiety has a lot to do with fear, fear of what one think might happen, what one is afraid will happen. Mix that with some maybe poor separation with daydreaming, fantasy and so on and one might end up thinking one is something or capable of something, or that others might do you something - dramatic and not good. And when this anxiety and obsessiveness gets bad enough, one goes around thinking about it all the time, and checking in different ways if these fears are true. Examples are worries one might stab someone with a knife (although that's far from what the obsessive person is capable of) and have problems around knives and people, that one can get contaminated by touching a door handle and has to wash the hands often and so on.

It might sound weird, but it's real in the mind of the sufferer and completely natural.

I've been in therapy and taking medication for a little over 4 years now, and I think there's been a steady improvement over the whole period, and when I started noticing improvements, that really gave motivation to continue the process. There have been three important things in my life, that has enabled me to change and become better. Two are therapy, talking to therapists, the other taking medication.

The third thing is my two kids.. there are wonderful things that happen when one becomes a parent, maybe the most positive thing is being able to give love to and take care of these small humans. I got psychotic around the birth of my first son, and that's maybe natural, as birth and the time around it is a time of a lot of changes, and natural, instinctive thoughts and feelings come into play. It might also have been poor sleep or lack of enough sleep, but I don't remember that much details from that period.

Regarding therapy and medication; I've noticed myself in periods with little therapy that my mental health has improved.. And I think that's because of the medicine doing its thing, as well as new ways of thinking and handling issues learned from therapy have been working gradually over time.

So it's maybe not the best thing to see a therapist every week, several times a week and so on. It might be more than enough to go every two weeks, once a month etc. This might be the most efficient way, as the mental health services can treat more people with less resources too.

As for psychosis, wow it's a trip to hell. It's like a nightmare you can't wake up from, and if you think of love, thinking, anger, fear, hate as separate wires in your brain, it's like these can get connected up the wrong way so that for example something you've feared deeply before now can be come fun. It's hard to explain in a good way, but it's important to say that most people who are psychotic do no harm, and that it's a lot about what goes on inside a person's head.

[Permalink] [By morphex] [Health (Atom feed)] [20 Mar 14:08 Europe/Oslo]